Deadline Disaster

Hi friends and Happy Wednesday!

Have you ever noticed when you really need life to go smoothly, it often turns upside-down? I was recently on a deadline. My final week was filled with sixteen-hour days, copious amounts of coffee, and truly frightening deadline hair as my family has fairly dubbed it. The tighter the deadline, the scarier the updo hair. It was during this week that the first of these incidents occurred. I’m using pictures from the most adorable notepads my daughter got for me to symbolize the emotions at each stage in the process.

First, I spilled scalding coffee on my lap and my laptop. Which did I move to save first? Being on deadline and the fear of losing my entire manuscript, I went for the computer first. In hindsight and with burns on my legs, that might not have been the wisest choice, but I reacted in panic. Clearly, I would never make it in the emergency services field.

My laptop was fried along with its power cord. I thankfully had the manuscript I was working on saved to the Cloud. It was literally the only doc I had saved on it. Praising God for that one. I managed to get my fried computer to run long enough to back it up on a hard drive. Meanwhile, the coffee literally percolated on the keyboard. Seriously. My laptop was brewing coffee. Only me.

Thankfully, my hubby had an older Mac I could use so to be a nice wife, I signed in as a guest user so I wouldn’t mess up any of his stuff. Little did I know that when you’re under a guest profile when you log off—nothing and I mean nothing is saved. All my revisions over the next two weeks—gone. But I had a zip drive where I saved everything or so I thought. My zip drive overheated and was destroyed. I kid you not. Now, I’m starting from scratch and have lost two weeks’ worth of work. And, to top it off, my printer went kaput today.

My hubby’s response:

Given all that’s happened, I can’t exactly blame him. I not only repel technology, I destroy it. So, here I am, starting afresh again. Praying for no more intermissions. But I have learned God’s still got this, and I strangely am not in panic mode about it. I know He’ll equip me with the words I need, and, on the bright side, I get to begin my new, organized document system from scratch that my awesome friend and fellow author, Jill Kemmerer taught me. Maybe starting over isn’t such a bad thing after all.

Reader Question:

How about you? For writers: any crazy deadline mishaps? For readers: has technology ever failed you?

Thanks for joining me this week!

Best,

Dani